


memento;

by Beanshiee



Category: Far Cry 5
Genre: Childhood Trauma, Gen, Violence, mentions of heavy domestic abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:21:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23874628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beanshiee/pseuds/Beanshiee
Summary: “But you are not religious.” She noticed, squinting her tired eyes a little. Those husky conversations they had were all she could count on while being trapped in the cage, starved for days. The only thing that kept her sane, more or less. “Why? And don’t tell me that religion is for “the weak”. I want an actual reason. Joseph is schizophrenic, John is just insane. You’re different.”~~In which Jacob shares a traumatic memory from his childhood.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	memento;

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be an actual, full one-shot but I have no will to write recently, so I’m just giving you this snippet of interaction between Jacob and my Dep; mostly because it’s a piece of what I wanted to be more depth to John-Jacob story in-game wise, since the game itself... Well.  
> There may be some grammar mistakes, sorry for that in advance.

“ _But **you** are not religious.”_ She noticed, squinting her tired eyes a little. Those husky conversations they had were all she could count on while being trapped in the cage, starved for days. The only thing that kept her sane, more or less. _“Why? And don’t tell me that religion is for “the weak”. I want an actual reason. Joseph is schizophrenic, John is just insane. You’re different.”_

Jacob’s eyes went more dark. She definitely shouldn’t have said that about his brothers and she could feel how thick the air has become. Wouldn’t even need a knife to cut it, she could do it with her nails.  
  
He was thinking about something; analyzing, wondering if he should respond, walk away, or squeeze her throat between the cage bars to remind her where her place was. And then he leaned back on the cold, steel cage, so close to her she could nearly touch his shoulder. He looked on his hands, then started talking.  
  
_“Back at our family home, I woke up one night because I heard someone screamin’. It wasn’t nothing unusual, the neighbourhood we lived in was like a favela. Constant abuse and shouting, to the point where it didn’t really bother anyone. We’ve got used to it, all three of us.”_ Jacob stopped and slowly took his knife from the holster and started twisting it between his fingers. _Nervous tick_ , she thought, not without a hint if curiosity. Whatever incident he was starting to describe, it was somehow painful to him, so she just listened, looking at him carefully.   
  
“ _But as much as it didn’ bother, there were some exceptions. I could recognize certains screams, knew who they belonged to. Sometimes it was neighbour’s son when he cut himself with the knife, sometimes the chick he fucked. But the moment I heard the scream on that particular night, I knew who it belonged to.”_  
  
 _I know too_ , she realized, already knowing where this story would eventually go, and felt a strong squeeze in her throat, like if someone was holding it, like if the air itself wanted her to suffer in that very moment. Jacob looked at her, and his eyes were cold, emotionless.  
  
 _“It was John.”_ He huffed, twisting the knife furiously, allowing it to dance between his knuckles. _“He was five at the time. Little kid, you could already tell he won’t grow as tall as I was at the time, he wouldn’t even get to Joseph’s level.. His bones were delicate, his legs slightly contorted, his body thin. We were often starving, but I was old enough to be able to deal with it and steal some food when nobody was watchin’. But every day without eatin’ was like a punch to the teeth for him. I was givin’ him all the food I could find, but it still wasn’t enough.”  
_  
The stories he told her were usually about himself, and his traumas from the war. But this one was different - this one was more intimate, like he was opening himself to her, and she felt bad for it. _I don’t deserve it_ , she thought.   
  
_“I stood up and rushed to the livin’ room. And I saw what I used to see many times before - our father was holding a belt, covered in blood, and on the ground layed John, sobbing, screaming so loud I was sure the whole neighbourhood was already aware of what was happenin’. So I did the same thing I always did - I stood between both of them, holding our father’s wrist,_ **beggin’** _him to stop.”_  
  
He looked at her again, and his lips curled in a ominous smile - cold, ruthless, but she could see the pain in the blue of his eyes, and she felt like she was looking at a young boy, instead of a grown up man, who was holding the whole region of this County in a tight grip.   
  
_“Ya’ think he listened? Nah.”_ Jacob clicked his tongue and she could sense the absolute hatred and venom sipping out of at every word and she realized that this is the part that he and John - and Joseph probably as well - had in common. The living, burning hatred towards everything and everyone outside of their family, hatred to the society, to the core of the world itself. But it was John who truly embraced it - Jacob was able to hide it, but broke in this specific moment.  
  
 _“He raised his hand and slapped me across the face. Right now I could snap him like a twig, but at that time he was much stronger than me, and I was starving for about five days. So, he pushed me to the wall like I weighed nothin’ and started hitting John, again. And I could feel the blood that was pouring somewhere from my head, but I didn’t care. So I rushed to him again, grabbed his shoulders and covered him with my back._ ” Jacob wasn’t looking at her anymore, instead his gaze was fixed on his knife, like if he wasn’t really there in that moment, like he truly came back to the past and felt every single detail once more.   
  
_“The first blow wasn’t that bad - I got used to this after the first two years or so. The belt cut my back all the way from one shoulder to another, but I didn’t care. The worst thing was the feeling of John’s trembling body, his whole body covered in blood. I saw it many times before, it used to happen every week, so I was just hopin’ that after twenty or thirty another blows on me our father would just get bored and leave us alone.”_ He stopped once again, the knife he held in his hands so heavy she could feel it, even though it weren’t her hands that were holding it.  
  
 _“But he didn’t. He started preaching, and out of the corner of my eye I noticed that he held a fuckin’ Bible in his left hand.”_ The chuckle that came out of his mouth was so dark and so cold it felt _inhuman,_ to the point it didn’t even fit him, like if it was _someone else_ chuckling instead.  
  
_“It was a second before he used this Bible to hit me in t’head, and I could count **all** the stars in the sky even though I was looking at the floor. John was just sobbing at this point, his throat so sore from screamin’ that he didn’t even had the strength to scream anymore.” _Jacob’s hand slowly reached her head between the cage bars and she thought that _this is it, that’s the end of the story_ , but then his fingers touched her hair and he started massaging her scalp in a gesture _so tender_ that she nearly melted. And she was absolutely sure he didn’t even know he was doing it, imagining that it was little John’s head instead, and he was trying to calm his little brother down, tell him _it will all be fine one day._  
  
 _“I see this Bible still sometimes, in the back of my head.”_ He murmured, not looking at her at all. _“And hear this thing’s that was our father voice, and hear the stories John told me after we’ve found each other, the stories about the family that adopted him afterwards. Turns out that the only thing that changed in his life after we got separated was that in this “new family”, the mother was abusing him as well.”_ And then he looked at her and Irina lost her breath, before his eyes were so dark she could barely see them, like if they dissapeared in his eye sockets, never to be seen again. His hand massaged her scalp for another few seconds of eerie silence, and then he stopped, and it seemed that he _was_ aware what he was doing, after all.  
  
_“I’m pretty sure you can figure out the rest by yourself.”_ And she did. For John and Joseph, the religion became a sort of copying mechanism. They didn’t have enough strength to forget, so now they’re using it for their own goals.   
  
But Jacob was different. Jacob despised religion for what it has done to his family.   
  
Deputy looked at him once again and gulped.  
  
And then he was gone, and the only companionship she had left for the rest of the night was the wolf on the other end of her cage.


End file.
